Including the novel published last year, Bella Poldark, I have written, I think, forty-six books – forty-three of them novels, one book of short stories, The Japanese Girl; the others were Poldark’s Cornwall and The Spanish Armadas, an illustrated history of the Anglo-Spanish war of the sixteenth century. Of the forty-three novels, only sixteen have been historical, the twelve Poldark novels, and Cordelia, The Forgotten Story, The Grove of Eagles and The Ugly Sister. Yet it is for the Poldarks that I have become best known.
There are historians of repute – and of course critics – who, while just admitting to the validity of the modern novel (which must be ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’, or, at least, experience so recalled), consider the historical novel, in anyone’s hands, a spurious art form per se, because it imposes the writer’s usually ignorant, possibly warped, probably over-romantic, over-coloured view upon a past time, that it presents history in a – to them – unconfirmed or unhistorical way. But a lot of this is true of any novel, either modern or historical. Any writer, any good writer, takes a set of events and imposes his own view on them. If there is no personal view there is no art. As Cézanne said of his paintings: ‘I have not tried to reproduce nature, I have represented it.’ And that is what any good writer does. And if he is good enough he creates a world of his own which the reader comes to inhabit and finds it comparable with life rather than identical with it.
And if one is to downgrade the historical novel, what is one to make of such trivia as War and Peace, Vanity Fair and Wuthering Heights, all historical novels in their time?
Historical novels as such divide easily into three classes. First, there are those which use actual historical personages as the chief characters of the books, such as Robert Graves’ I, Claudius, and Helen Waddell’s Peter Abelard. Second, there are those in which historical personages are substantial figures in the story but have as their main characters fictitious persons – very often, as it were, standing beside the historical characters. Such are Rose Macaulay’s They Were Defeated and my own The Grove of Eagles. Third, there are those which use entirely, or almost entirely, fictitious characters set in a recreated historical time. Such are Stevenson’s The Black Arrow, or H. F. M. Prescott’s The Man on a Donkey, or the Poldarks.
There has been a tendency in critical circles over the last halfcentury to rate these categories in descending importance. The novel featuring solely historical characters is rated higher than the novels in which historical characters play only a part; and the novel in which historical characters play a part is rated higher than those in which all the characters are fictional.
This is pretentious nonsense. Every type and quality of historical novel from fine to awful has been produced in all three categories. In any case you only have to regard the first three novels mentioned above and consider in what category they belong.
But in all three classes of novel one has to attempt a degree of historical truth as well as a truth to human nature. Man has not changed, but his reaction to certain life patterns has. Unless the writer can understand these and transmit his understanding to the reader, his characters are simply modern people in fancy dress. Similarly there must be a geographical truth. Cornwall has particularly suffered from the writers who have spent a few months living there and have decided to write an epic set in the county; in fact it could just as well have been set in Kent, Yorkshire or Cumberland for all it matters, but Cornwall, they think, is more romantic.
I believe it to be most important in the third category (where all of the characters are fictional) to deal as much as possible in historical fact. I have an inventive brain, but I could never have devised all the events which fill the pages of the Poldark novels. It would be tedious to enumerate all the sources – indeed it would mean hours of research in reverse, tracing the origins of this event and that, back from the novel to the manuscript, the old newspaper, the map, the out-of-print book, the contemporary travel book, the parochial history, the mining manual, the autobiography.
As a selection: Jim Carter’s arrest for poaching, his imprisonment in Launceston Gaol; fever, and blood incompetently let by a fellow prisoner, Jim’s subsequent death. From a line in Wesley’s Journal.
Description of Launceston Gaol. From Howard’s State of the Prisons, 1784 edition.
Ross’s attempt to start a copper-smelting company in Cornwall to compete against the companies of South Wales which used to send the coal and take the copper away by sea; and the failure of the attempt. Not precise as to detail, but accurate in general terms about such an attempt which was made at that time.
The two wrecks at the end of Demelza and the rioting miners on the beach. Taken from a report of such a double wreck on Perranporth beach in 1778.
The voting procedure at Bodmin for the election of two Members of Parliament in 1790. Factual.
The occasion when a rich young woman, Caroline Penvenen, calls in Dr Dwight Enys, and when he gets there asks him to attend to her dog. The further occasion when he is called in to the same young lady because it is believed she has the morbid sore throat, and what he finds. Both are related by Dr James Fordyce in his book on fevers which had a limited circulation in 1789.
The smuggling in Warleggan. Most details are factual; also the way in which Ross, apparently trapped, escapes detection.
Conditions in the French prisoner-of-war camp at Quimper are chiefly taken from accounts given by Lady Ann Fitzroy, who for a time was imprisoned there.
The struggle for power in Truro and the quarrel between Lord Falmouth and the Burgesses supported by Sir Francis Basset is almost all derived from the contents of a single letter written by Mr Henry Rosewarne, the MP newly elected in defiance of the Boscawen interest, addressed to Lord Falmouth, explaining the reasons for the Corporation’s defiance and defending his own actions. Corroborative information came from Cornelius Cardew and others.
The riots in Camborne, Sir Francis Basset’s suppression of them, the death penalty for three of the rioters, two reprieved, one, Peter Hoskin, hanged: all factual.
The character of Monk Adderley was based on a character in the original William Hickey Diaries. Details of the duel between Adderley and Ross came largely from the life of John Wilkes.
The run on Pascoe’s Bank in Truro, the pressure by the other banks, the anonymous letters deliberately circulated to create a panic. All factual, except not exactly as to date.
Dwight Enys saving the injured miner by giving him what is now called ‘the kiss of life’. From a case related in John Knyveton’s Surgeon’s Mate.
So in the case of the Penzance lifeboat.
So in the case of the stagecoach. The original excerpt from the Morning Post for Monday, 23rd of November 1812, is printed in The Miller’s Dance in its entirety. As far as I know, the mystery of the robbery was never solved. I went up to Gloucestershire to examine an eighteenth-century stagecoach in detail and worked out, at least to my own satisfaction, how it could have been done.
As for Bella Poldark, I do not think I would have ventured to tell her extraordinary life story, were it not for the history of Charlotte Cushman, who was born in Boston in 1816.
There is, naturally enough, the converse risk of becoming too preoccupied by history. One can so easily detect the midnight oil, the desire to instruct. But novels are about life. If a reader wishes to pursue a particular subject, textbooks by the thousand exist. An author tends to be reluctant, once he has discovered something, at great trouble to himself, not to make the best of it. But the temptation must be resisted. It is a recurring discipline which should be exercised by every novelist who does research, whether the research is into the Peninsular War or into modern techniques of assassination. What is not relevant is irrelevant.
In my view, the historical novel at its best is not a spurious form of art because the past of itself is not a shard that one can dig up and measure and piece together. No one can do this, however conscientious, because history is not an objective science. Historical truth is not mathematical truth. The past has really no existence other than that which our minds can give it. Even the pure historian is at the mercy of hissources, and his sources usually are other fallible, or prejudiced, or forgetful human beings.
In my one book of short stories there is a story about the death and the burial of William the Conqueror. All the material facts for that came from a contemporary account by Ordericus Vitalis, which is as near as even the most conscientious historian can get to the truth of that matter. If I had written this as an essay and punctuated it with numbers and asterisks and then notes at the bottom saying Ord. Vit., page 231, and following with ib., ib., ib., people would no doubt have been more impressed. But in fact Ordericus Vitalis was thirteen when William died. In other words he probably depended on an eyewitness, or possibly even hearsay, and who knows how good his information was?
I am not trying to equate the good historian with the good historical novelist. Each has different aims. The latter, in pursuit of these aims, is more likely to err than the former. But each, in a subjective profession, is fallible.
And the pure historian – like the good novelist, though in a lesser degree – moulds the past, whether he intends to or not; he colours it with his own personality. All good historians set their personal impression on the past: Thucydides, Gibbon, Macaulay, Froude, Rowse – go through them all, and they all do that, for it can’t be otherwise.
Probably the only way of judging a work of art is to try to measure or judge the integrity of intention. If it has that, it may be a masterpiece. Or it may be a very poor and flawed work. But with such integrity it can’t be all bad, and it can’t be all lost.